We've all witnessed the explosion of information within our organizations. Recent studies have estimated that nearly 15 petabytes—15 million gigabytes—of data are created every day. This data represents the backbone of how our industries interact, how they manage their businesses, how they perceive themselves, and how they position themselves to compete. It doesn't reside on any individual computing platform, application, or corporate silo, but it has an incalculable value that represents the lifeblood of our commerce.

The free service stores your passwords online using AES encryption and offers features that provide essentially one-click access to multiple password-protected Web sites.

Written by Chris Smith

Have you ever wished that passwords were easier to remember so that you could use ones that were a little stronger? And is your three-ring binder containing your list of passwords just a little too accessible for anyone actually snooping around your office? Or maybe you keep your passwords in a secret Word document with a filename that matches your daughter's Girl Scout troop. If you're not using some kind of password vault today, you might want to reassess your procedures because there are many new choices today for either free or low-cost software and hardware vaults that keep your passwords safe through AES encryption. The question then becomes which is most convenient rather than which is the most secure, since all of them are likely more secure than what you are doing currently.

More than 90 percent of the servers running next to IBM i servers are running Windows. And more than 50 percent of these Windows servers run MS SQL Server to perform some form of reporting against data that was stored on the IBM i system. This reporting process uses SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages to bundle data and generate business reports.